Money Politics Meets People Power

ByKosaku Narioka

“Money politics” has long had the negative connotation in Japan of powerful donors seeking outsized influence over top politicians. Construction companies and sacks of cash. Gold bars under the floorboards.

European Pressphoto Agency

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan shakes hands with voters during his stumping tour for the upcoming Upper House Election in Kobe, western Japan. The election will be held July 11.

Two websites are trying to change that, encouraging average citizens to ramp up small donations to candidates. And the ruling Democratic Party of Japan — which lost two leaders to money scandals recently — is looking to promote the practice with new tax breaks, as it seeks to ban corporate donations.

If the trend takes root, that would make a big cultural change for Japanese politics, where average citizens are far less likely than Americans to make campaign contributions.

Rakuten, Inc., a leading Internet service company in Japan, last July launched a website Love Japan 2010 Let’s Go to the Election. The site listed, as of Monday, 222 politicians people can fund — including a former Rakuten executive running with the new opposition Your Party in the Tokyo suburb of Saitama prefecture.

Yahoo Japan Corp. earlier this month opened a new site as part of its Everyone’s Politics portal. That listed 14 lawmakers as of June 28 who can receive donations.

The Rakuten site shows politicians’ mug shots, profiles, reproduced blog posts and e-mail messages for supporters. It also features politician-turned-commentator Koichi Hamada, widely known by the nickname Hamako, who is famous for speaking more candidly than the typical Japanese officeholder. On the website, he answers questions like “What is the difference between campaign cars and motorcycle gangsters?” (Both known to make terrible noise)

So far, interest has been modest. Since its July 27 launch, Rakuten had collected 826 contributions, totaling more than 7.25 million yen (about $81,000), as of Monday. Kiyoka Komiyama, a Yahoo spokeswoman, said the figures for the Yahoo site are not available as it was just launched.

The small traffic on the sites isn’t surprising, since there’s little tradition for individuals to donate. “In Japan, some people think politics is what ‘the government’ does, and they don’t necessarily have a mindset of their moving politics,” Fumihiko Igarashi, a DPJ lawmaker told JRT.

“The public’s interest in politics will be enhanced when they donate money, however little it is,” said Mr. Igarashi, a former reporter for Japanese newswire Jiji Press who reported from various countries accompanying prime and foreign ministers.

The culture of small individual contributions has soared in the U.S. in recent years, particularly stoked by the ease of giving over the Internet, and by Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, which claimed to have received money from a record three million donors.

Precise figures on donating patterns in Japan are hard to come by, since the country’s laws governing disclosure require considerably less detail than in the U.S. — and there’s no centralized recordkeeping. But a JRT spot check of records by some top politicians suggests minimal financial backing from average citizens.

Ichiro Ozawa — who recently stepped down as secretary-general of the DPJ after a money scandal — reported raising six million yen (about $67,000) for last year’s lower house election, five million of that coming from the DPJ. Of the 14.6 million yen (about $163,000) reported raised by former prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, just 600,000 yen appears like it could have from individual supporters, a group of backers called the Hokkaido Fraternity of Politics and Economics Conversation. LDP leader Sadakazu Tanigaki reported raising 5.11 million yen (about $57,000), five million coming from a local LDP branch.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who began his career as a grassroots political activist, appears to have more of an individual donor base. He reported total contributions of eight million yen (about $90,000) for last year’s lower house campaign — five million from the DPJ, three million from “The Group to Support Naoto Kan.” The 2009 report for that group hasn’t yet been made public. A 2008 filing showed that 670 people collectively gave the organization 21.9 million yen (about $245,000 ) at a party the organization held, and seven people were listed as directly giving 4.6 million yen (about $51,000).

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of
this material are governed by our
Subscriber Agreement
and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones
Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit